Monday, August 31, 2009

The dusty streets of Blog City

It's remarkable how quickly the blogging craze came and went. For awhile we were all out there panning the stream, sifting every aspect of our mundane lives and collecting page views and comments like flecks of gold. Some of us, I think, secretly fantasized that it might turn into something that would be beat working.

A year or two later and most of the personal blogs are ghost towns, the wind sighing down a dusty street, the occasional tumbleweed rolling by. That includes this one: Until today, the last update was about six weeks ago. I didn't make a conscious decision to pull the plug on it; it just happened. To belabor the ghost town analogy, the rail line never made it here, veering instead toward the more vibrant community of Facebookville.

Not hard to see why. You can only read a blog; on Facebook, you can take a quiz and easily determine which make of car or mythical creature you might be. And with a blog, you feel like you should write several complete sentences; with Facebook, a single pithy phrase will suffice. Good thing, too, since it's tiresome to do more than that on an iPhone keyboard.

Life hurries on. But you wonder what will become of all these abandoned blogs. Because they're mostly free, people have no incentive to take them down. I guess they'll last as long as the Internet infrastructure does, silent scrapbooks of days gone by. Look at these 2D pictures of frolicking children who are now adults, these quaint dinner parties from an earlier age, these reviews of long-forgotten books and movies. Ah, the days before the holographic monitor and the neural interface; I remember them well.

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I'm a full-time writer of little renown. My other interests include photography, plunking away on the guitar, and solving (eventually) New York Times crossword puzzles. The beginning of this blog signaled the end of the blogging phenomenon. No need to thank me.